The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

swallowed. That he was even considering sharing any more of his painful past with her surprised the hell out of him.

      ‘Are you sure? It gets a little messy,’ he warned, aware that his voice was huskier than usual.

      She pursed her lips and waited.

      He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. ‘Do you remember that last day at Verbier? You may have been too young—’

      ‘I remember.’ Her smile was poignant. ‘Your mother turned up out of the blue and demanded to see your father. Lily was screaming vile things at your father...’

      He clenched his jaw. ‘And he was busy taking out his anger on my mother. They spoke in French, so you didn’t understand, of course. He told her she had no right to be there. That he was done with her pathetic, needy clinging.’

      Ana flinched. He smoothed his thumbs down her cheeks.

      ‘He said was leaving her—divorcing her as soon as they returned to Geneva.’

      ‘Oh, Bastien...’

      He shook his head, a cold, icy hand clamping over his chest where for a long time he’d remained frozen. ‘Here’s the kicker. He told her if she intended to fight for me he wouldn’t stand in her way. And she...’ An old wound, never really healed, split open, throwing him back sixteen years, so that his parents’ voices were as clear as if they were in the room with him now, ‘She said if she couldn’t have my father then she didn’t want me.’

      Ana gasped and threw her arms around him. He held her tight, reeling from the remembered rejection even as he acknowledged that the pain he’d felt all these years was considerably less this time around. As if baring his soul to Ana had washed away the rough edges of anguish.

      ‘Oh, my God, Bastien. I’m so sorry. I had no idea,’ she murmured softly.

      He finally pulled back, focused on her crouched before him. One hand touched his cheek and he exhaled noisily. She was offering comfort. When had that ever happened to him? He’d forged his way through life on his own after that stark double rejection sixteen years ago. And he’d succeeded. Hell, he’d more than succeeded. He’d excelled at everything he’d ever set his mind to.

      He glanced into Ana’s face, ready to tell her to save her pity for someone else. Tears shone in her eyes.

      ‘You’re crying again.’

      ‘No child should hear that from anyone—most of all their parent.’

      ‘You cry for me even after all you’ve suffered?’

      His voice sounded strange in his own ears, and that tight band around his chest loosened. Shaken by the feelings rolling over him, he caught a tear from her cheek with his thumb.

      ‘Maybe I cry for both of us.’ Slowly she raised herself up on her knees and kissed his cheek—one, then the other. ‘I’m sorry for both of us.’

      Bastien wanted to catch her to him, to hold her tight and never let her go. And that thought above everything else unsettled him, shook him to his core, made him pull away from her.

      ‘Don’t be. It was a lesson well learnt. People use love as a tool to hurt each other. My mother tried to take her own life because she loved my father too much to watch him with another woman. She never once stopped to think of her son or how her actions would affect him.’

      She rocked back. ‘You think she betrayed you?’

      ‘No, I don’t. In fact I don’t think she was thinking about me at all. She was thinking only of herself—obsessed with living in fairytales, searching for that elusive happy-ever-after.’

      Clenching her hands in her lap, she swallowed. ‘Love isn’t a fairytale.’

      ‘No, it’s an excuse people use to hurt to each other. Every time I think I can forgive her I remember that she chose the most dramatic way possible to demonstrate her so-called love. A love that didn’t include me.’

      * * *

      Ana swallowed, trying to dislodge the lump of pain that had taken root there since Bastien had started speaking. Her heart ached for him. The thought of the toll his mother’s action had taken on him tore at her insides.

      ‘Did you...were you the one who found her?’

      He frowned down at her. ‘No. Don’t you remember?’

      Puzzled, Ana shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t think so...’

      ‘You don’t the remember the chaos after my father and Lily returned a few hours later?’

      ‘Yes, I do, but—’ Shock stopped her breath. ‘Are you saying that’s when your mother tried to...?’

      Bitterness twisted his lips. ‘And she almost succeeded. The doctors said another half an hour and she’d have been dead.’

      ‘But how?’

      Ana remembered the sad, broken figure of Solange Heidecker. Ana had been in one of the guest rooms, hiding after the screams had lapsed into an eerie silence, when the door had opened. Solange had walked in, looked around, and immediately turned to leave. At the last moment she’d seen Ana and slowly approached. Even at her young age the melancholy surrounding Bastien’s mother had struck her.

      ‘Which is your mother’s room, mon enfant? Come and show me.’ She’d held out her hand.

      Ana had shown her, had stood in the doorway as she’d inspected every item of clothing, every shoe, every trinket in the room. Finally she’d sunk onto the bed, tears coursing down her face. Ana remembered her own sadness, remembered feeling in some way responsible for the woman’s pain.

      She’d watched Solange take her shoes off slowly and lie back on the bed. ‘I’m not feeling very well, cherie.’ She’d smiled another sad, heartbreaking smile. ‘Please ask the housekeeper to bring me something for my headache, would you?’

      Icy fingers of dread clamped around Ana’s heart. Her vision clouded, a dizzying faintness overcoming her.

       No! No, no—

      ‘Ana!’ Bastien’s voice came from a far distance, from beyond the vacuum closing around her.

       Oh, please God, no...

      Her whole body had gone numb and her heart was beating dully, as if preparing to stop beating altogether. Bastien’s hands gripped her shoulders, but even his firm shake couldn’t force Ana from the dark fog of the past.

      What had she done? Dear God, what had she done?

      ‘Ana, talk to me. What is it?’

      The urgency in his voice finally scraped the edges of her consciousness. Slowly his face swam into view. Her heart ached at its perfect beauty, at the hard, impassive edge he portrayed to the world, at the concern he couldn’t help but feel—because deep down Bastien was just a man whose heart ached for love, just as hers did.

      Most of all her heart was ripped open at the knowledge that she was the cause of his pain. That she had helped shape him into the hardened cynic he was today.

      Tears blistered the back of her eyes. ‘I’m so sorry, Bastien. Oh God, I...I’m so sorry.’ Her voice broke and a sob dredged from the very depths of her pulverised soul erupted through her lips.

      ‘For what?’

      ‘Your mother. She took pills, didn’t she?’ The words scraped her throat, as if rebelling against being aired.

      A frown slowly gathered on his brow. ‘Yes, but how...?’

      ‘She... Oh, God, Bastien... She didn’t try to commit suicide. I think she overdosed by accident. And I...I gave her the pills.’

CHAPTER